Rumors

 Our daily lives are full of rumors and misinformation. We also need to beware of drawing broad lessons of history from isolated incidents. Let’s illustrate with the “fact” of a lone survivor at Little Big Horn - the horse named Comanche. That’s what the history books taught me when I was younger, but already by 1884 one man saw it a fallacy. Here’s how. The book I republished by William V. Wade gives witness to this scenario.

     “Many people think that Captain Keogh’s claybank horse,

Comanche, was the only horse that escaped the massacre at the Little Big Horn fight in 1876. I saw evidence to the contrary. I was up in Canada during the summer of 1884 in the capacity of Deputy U.S. Marshal and while looking over an Indian camp near a river that ran by the city of Brandon, I met a young half  breed boy about 19 or 20. …

    I saw a large horse picketed near where I met the young man. The horse attracted my attention so much that I walked over to take a look at him. He had much better conformation than the ordinary Indian horse and I soon discovered he was branded on the left shoulder with “7th USC” meaning he had once belonged to the U.S. Cavalry. The young man who could speak quite a bit of English said, ‘Do you think you ever seen him?’ I told him I knew the horse had been with the 7th Cavalry to which he replied, ‘There are more of them; they followed us up here from the Yellowstone River.’ He pointed in the direction of some other outstanding horses and said, ‘Do you want to look at them, too?’ I knew the Indians would resent my looking them over so I just let well enough alone but I positively saw the brand on the one and suspected the rest of them carried the U. S. brand, too. Comanche was just wounded too bad or he would have arrived in Canada with the rest of those 7th Cavalry horses that followed the Indians on their last flight across the border into Canada.”

     The misinformed story of his being the lone survivor lived on and when he died his body was sent to the University of Kansas to be stuffed and put on display, where he resides today in the university's Natural History Museum. Today most historians agree with William Wade’s version, but unfortunately nobody seems to care.